don't be evil

The Commission Nationale de l’Informatique, a French data-protection watchdog, announced on Tuesday that it will decide in June if Google broke European privacy laws when it consolidated 60 privacy policies into one earlier this year, Reuters reports.

Normally my reaction to new technological developments is “Hooray! We’re living in the future!” But when I discovered yesterday that the monstrous unblinking eye of Google Street View had invaded my tiny hometown (population 1,534—double what it was when I was a wee boy), what I felt was more like roller-coaster horror/panic. My memories of Bon Accord are pretty much all in faded Super-8 and grainy black-and-white NTSC (we didn’t have a colour television set until 1978), with plenty of Walker Evans/Diane Arbus/David Lynch grace notes. The name of the place puts me in mind of innocence and freedom—but also of mean dogs, dead cats, sketchy neighbours, retarded teenagers, agricultural odours, rotting upholstery in abandoned automobiles.